‘He would cause too much of a fuss’: Launceston General Hospital HR didn’t act on Jim Griffin alert

“They said he would cause too much of a fuss if he was taken from that ward.” - The LGH HR department was allegedly told about paedophile nurse James Griffin back in 2011 - But nothing was done.

IT WAS 2011 when a whistleblower first alerted Launceston General Hospital’s human resources department that a serial paedophile was working on the children’s ward.

But that whistleblower – hospital social worker Kylee Pearn, who’d been molested by the nurse in question as a child – was “stunned” by the response.

“I told them very clearly I thought he was a risk on the ward,” Ms Pearn told Tasmania’s child sexual abuse commission of inquiry on Tuesday.

“The response was there was nothing they could do without a conviction. They had looked into him – I remember those words – and his HR or personnel file, and that he had been on 4K for a long time.

“They said he would cause too much of a fuss if he was taken from that ward, that he was an ANMF (union) rep or member, and consequently I got the sense that it was just all too hard.”

That nurse – James Geoffrey Griffin – continued to work with children until his death by suicide in 2019, after he was finally charged with a number of child sexual abuse offences.

Ms Pearn explained she’d been sexually abused by Griffin for years as a child, from the age of about seven.

Then when she began working at Launceston General Hospital as a social worker in 2011, she had the “confronting” experience of regularly running into the child abuser at work.

Kylee Pearn. Picture: Luke Bowden/ABC

At one stage, Ms Pearn’s own child needed to spend a night on the 4K paediatric ward

“To see him in that environment and to have fear for my own children. I was afraid to leave my child’s bedside. I didn’t want to go to the toilet, I didn’t want to get coffee, I didn’t want to get anything,” she said.

“I remember sitting there thinking I knew I needed to keep my child safe from that person, but how incredibly unfair it was that every other parent who were bringing children into that ward did not know.”

Eventually, Ms Pearn decided it was time to speak up – alerting human resources.

“I was hoping they would remove him from 4K,” she said.

But nothing was done.

Kylee Pearn said she told Launceston General Hospital’s human resources department about paedophile James Geoffrey Griffin back in 2011, but no action was taken. Picture: Luke Bowden/ABC

Within a few days of reporting Griffin to HR, he approached Ms Pearn at work on three separate occasions and kissed her cheek.

“I felt quite intimidated by that, I felt really unsure as to whether maybe he knew somehow that I’d say something,” she told the inquiry.

When another victim-survivor told police, Mr Pearn came forward too, with Griffin being charged in 2019.

“I wanted to stop him and keep other children safe, as well as support another person who had come forward,” she said.

However, Ms Pearn said her experiences since coming forward had been “far more difficult” than the child abuse she’d suffered at Griffin’s hands.

She said a senior staff member at the hospital “fobbed” off her concerns, that the National Redress Scheme had “asked a number of horrendous questions”, and that media outlets had published “triggering” material and images.

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